With Cambridge Analytica's involvement with various elections, European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) transposition in the next month and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg latest hearing at the US Senate, it is clear that targeting is at the centre of cultural, economical and political practices that call for our attention. Online and offline targeting, if such a distinction applies at all, raise questions about ethics, digital rights, big data ecosystems, dark patterns, automation, privacy, internet governance and people's agency online. The New Political Communication Unit (PIR Department, Royal Holloway, University of London) is holding its annual conference to dig deeper into these issues and put them in a larger context of mass and micro targeting. The conference aims to understand what academics and digital rights NGO practitioners can tell us about the way different (political) actors use big data practices to influence people's behaviours and preferences. Importantly, we aim to understand how such practices affect the way people communicate with each other and with such actors and how these affect people's subjectivities, political participation and interaction with the community. We explore this across different domains of practice and with an eye to historical continuities and changes.

For our next Rethinking Politics in Data Times seminar series we're excited to invite Dr Anastasia Denisova from the Communication and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster to talk about Memes, virality and Russian politics. Dr. Denisova will talk about new creative means of expression that were enabled by the interactive technologies. Not only people can communicate and upload their ideas and opinions online, they can actively participate in shaping of the agenda, respond to the narratives of decision-makers and subvert ideologies. One of the means of communication of the digital natives – memes – can be used in oh so many ways, from the digital folklore and slang, to the tools of political resistance to media hegemony and propaganda. This talk will draw on the main principles of meme theory and use examples from the Russian twitter, as well as link meme studies from the Western and non-Western perspectives.

Anastasia Denisova is a Lecturer in Journalism at the Communication and Media Research Institute at the University of Westminster, UK. She has researched and published academic articles on memes, viral stories, parody and social media, propaganda and resistance via creative means online. The links to her journalism and academic pieces are all here: https://camri.ac.uk/staff/anastasia-denisova/

When: Thursday, February 8th 2018, at 5pm.

Where: Windsor Building, Room 103, Royal Holloway University, Egham.

All the seminar series events are live-tweeted, Join us for the debate -> #RethinkingPoliticsData

We will also have recap blogs and podcasts with the speakers so stay tuned!

Entry is free of charge and we look forward to thinking and debating with you about the future of politics in data times - All welcome!

One March 12, 2017, Tim Berners-Lee, marked the 28th year since the inception of the Worldwide Web with three collective challenges: 1) The loss of control of our personal data, 2) the concentration of ownership and algorithmic practices which are facilitating the intensification and spread of misinformation and 3) the need for more accountability and regulation around political advertising. When all of these concerns are taken together, a new challenge emerges: the intensification of personalised economies, predicated on the content silos we increasingly operate within on digital platforms. The talk will therefore consider how advertising platforms like Facebook or companies like Cambridge Analytica, leveraged vast amounts of data to produce granulated, psychographic profiles that matched American voters with targeted political messages in the recent Trump elections. In so doing, we will discuss how datafication should not be uniquely understood as an economic process but equally, as a means to garner political influence, raising important questions around the myriad ways in which political parties are now using our data to reach their potential voters.

Biography:

Dr. Jennifer Pybus is a Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the diverse ways in which our digital lives are being datafied, turned into social big data that fuels our increasingly personalised, data intensive economy. Her current research is looking at the politics of datafication and everyday life, specifically in relation to those critical points of tension that lie at the intersections between digital culture, Big Data and emerging advertising and marketing practices. Part of this work focuses on the political economy of social media platforms, display ad economies, the analytics of search engine optimization and the rise of new sites wherein data can be exchanged for value, particularly within the mobile ecosystem.

This term’s Department of Politics and International Relations Research Seminar will be kicked off by Prof Ben O’Loughlin, professor of International Relations at Royal Holloway’s PIR and Director of the New Political Communication Unit. His publications include Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations (University of Michigan Press 2017), Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order (Rouledge 2013), Radicalisation and Media: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology (Routledge 2011) and War and Media (Polity 2010). Prof O’Loughlin will talk about 'Winning hearts and minds in hot spots? Explaining the effects of EU strategic narratives in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine'.

The Research Seminar takes place this Wednesday, 10 January and starts at 4.30 pm in FW101.

The journal was born in the midst of a global war on terror that locked down time and space such that all conflicts seemed to become part of a single campaign. Since then there have been significant transformations in the way war and conflict is produced, enacted, negotiated, remembered and ‘felt’ in, through and with media.

The aim of the tenth anniversary conference is to consider, evaluate and reflect upon these transformations through the themes: Spaces of War and War of Spaces.

Spaces of War allows us to analyse how media spaces (traditional, digital, cultural, aesthetic, embodied, mnemonic) are used to position wars in space and time in a manner that transforms the conduct, outcomes and consequences of war for all involved.

War of Spaces allows us to analyse how ‘war’ actors (political, military, survivors, victims) utilize, integrate and compete over (media) space thereby thereby recreating space and time in a manner that is transformative across political, social, cultural and personal spheres.

Drawing on these themes, the tenth anniversary conference aims to showcase the best research in this field while also taking stock of how the field has developed and to identify the emerging challenges we face.

We are particularly interested in scholarly and practice contributions that speak to these themes through a range of topics across various spheres and powers relations (global, gender) including (but not limited to):

Panel submissions are welcome. Panel proposals should include a short description (200 words) together with abstracts for each of the papers (150-200 words each including details of the contributor), and the name and contact details of the panel proposer. The panel proposer should co-ordinate the submissions for that panel as a single proposal.

For our next seminar of Rethinking Politics in Data Times (Monday December 4th at 5pm), we are honoured to invite Dr. Anna Feigenbaum, who is the Principal Academic in Digital Storytelling at Bournemouth University where she teaches multimedia journalism and convene the Civic Media Hub and BU Datalabs project..

The title of her talk is - From Scraping to Storytelling: Dealing with Data in Social Justice Research

Drawing from my experience founding the Bournemouth University-based, Civic Media Hub and Datalab project, in this reflective presentation I highlight challenges and opportunities that come with practices of data storytelling for social justice. Specifically, I reflect on data gathering, the ethics of data visualization, and the problem of data distortion, particularly when working with sensitive issues and vulnerable populations.

While the rise of big and open data diversifies the kinds of stories we can tell with numbers, sensitive subjects often have no straightforward data source, documents are scattered across agencies and organisations, or are kept hidden. This ‘uneven transparency’ raises important questions about the duty to document (Larsen 2014), particularly in regard to vulnerable populations (prisoners, detainees, those living in conflict zones).

In relation to data visualization, recent years have seen an increasing popularity of the use of infographics, maps and other media interactives. At the same time, giving visual narrative to numbers comes with risks and ethical issues that researchers must address, including the statistical and graphic representation of people’s lives and deaths.

Linked to these challenges of access to data and its representation, perhaps the biggest challenges in data-driven storytelling is data distortion. In every stage of the data storytelling process, from gathering information to circulating a visualisation on social media, distortion can come into play. For this reason we believe that transparency around data storytelling processes and data sources is at the heart of data storytelling for social justice.

Dr. Anna Feigenbaum is the author of Protest Camps (Zed 2013), Tear Gas (Verso 2017) and the forthcoming Data Storytelling Workbook (Routledge 2019). She is a Principal Academic in Digital Storytelling at Bournemouth University where she is the PI and founder of the BU Civic Media Hub and Datalabs project. Established in 2014, this project was designed to bring together a multidisciplinary, cross-Faculty team of academics and students from Communications, Geography and Data Science to work in collaboration with Journalists, NGOs and digital designers to co-create effective ways of engaging sensitive social issues through data analysis and communications. Through continued workshops and public events, our team engages in a participatory approach to data storytelling that combines principles of design, narrative theory, scaffolded technology learning and hacklab style collaborations. Read more at: http://www.civicmedia.io/

When: Monday, December 4th 2017, at 5pm.

Where: Windsor Building, Room 103, Royal Holloway University, Egham.

All the seminar series events are live-tweeted, Join us for the debate -> #RethinkingPoliticsData

We will also have recap blogs and podcasts with the speakers so stay tuned!

Entry is free of charge and we look forward to thinking and debating with you about the future of politics in data times - All welcome!

This Thursday, 23rd of November 2017 for our Rethinking Politics in Data Times seminar series, we collaborate with our colleagues from AAME, Centre for Politics in Africa, Asia and the Middle East and invite Dr. Maria Repnikova, who is an Assistant Professor in Global Communication at Georgia State University, and the Director of Center for Global Information Studies. Dr. Repnikova will talk on China as a Media Player: From Domestic Media Politics to Ambitions for Global Dominance.

Dr. Repnikova specialises on Chinese politics and is working on two research projects at the moment: China's Global Story-Telling: An Attempt at Soft Power, and From Economics to the Media: Propaganda Diffusion Experiment in China. She recently published a book titled - Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism at Cambridge University Press (2017). In this book she examines the webs of an uneasy partnership between critical journalists and the state in China. The book highlights the distinctiveness of Chinese journalist-state relations, as well as the renewed pressures facing them in the Xi era. In addition, Repnikova also combined a comparative analysis of Chinese politics with media politics in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia.

When: Thursday, November 23rd 2017, at 5pm.

Where: Windsor Building, Room 004, Royal Holloway University, Egham.

All the seminar series events are live-tweeted, Join us for the debate -> #RethinkingPoliticsData

We will also have recap blogs and podcasts with the speakers so stay tuned!

Entry is free of charge and we look forward to thinking and debating with you about the future of politics in data times - All welcome!

This week the University of Trento in Italy will host a workshop exploring the role of narratives in international relations. Narrating Crisis: Mapping the Terrain of Normative Meaning is held on October 13-14 and organised by Vincenzo Della Salla, Maren Hofius and Antje Weiner. NPC's Ben O'Loughlin will present research examining how young people in Israel-Palestine and Ukraine narrate the role of the European Union in the conflicts their societies face. This is part of the Jean Monnet-funded project Crisis, Conflict and Critical Diplomacy of the EU (C3EU). Ben will present findings with Alister Miskimmon that utilize Q-sort methods that elicit narratives rather than the usual surveys of attitudes and beliefs in public opinion research. In light of Joe Nye's statement that 'whose story wins' will define world affairs in the 21st century, there is a need for methods that bring to light the stories people hold about their experiences, their country and its role in the world. This presentation is a first step towards realising that goal.

Friday, 13 October 2017

13.30-14.00 Welcome and Introduction

14.00-15.00 Chiara de Franco - The Logic of Narratives: Theatre, narratives and international norms

15.00-16.00 Mark Gilbert - The Eurocentrism of Narratives of European Integration

Do join to hear Declan McDowell-Naylor talk about his research at the first of the Department of Politics and International Relations' PhD seminar series this term.

Time: Wednesday 4 October, 12-1pm

Place: FW101

Outline

This paper explores various forms of ‘public-making’ practice observed during an eighteen-month ethnographic study of the development of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) in the United Kingdom (UK). The term public-making practices refers to ways of “assembling publics and of gauging their will or opinion” (Barry, 2013, 98) which in turn generates “empirical knowledge about publics, their opinions and concerns (ibid., 99). I argue that there is a pressing need to understand the observable role of public-making in the development of CAVs, under the normative and analytic terms of a politics of technology that speaks to both power-relations and democracy. In this area, Philip Howard (2015) has, for example, argued for purposeful civic engagement with the governments and businesses developing the Internet of Things (IoT), to help build what he terms a ‘democracy of our own devices’. However, despite an enormous range of popular debate about connected and autonomous vehicles in recent years, often focusing on the headline-friendly misnomer “driverless cars”, academic research focusing on political and social understandings of CAV development remains forthcoming. In response to this, I argue that CAV development can be located within the fields of science and technology studies (STS), political communication, and political theory. The conceptual themes and devices, empirical focuses applied to CAV development, and the research methods used in this analysis are derived from approaches jointly adopted from these fields. Ultimately, in terms of both democratic politics and power-relations, the analysis provides an overall picture that has some normative grounds for optimism. However, uncertainties persist about its viability into the future, due to evolving organizational structures, media effects, and the broader, macro-political consequences of issues such as Britain’s exit from the European Union. This paper contributes empirical findings about public engagement with the development of digital and automated technologies at a key time for internet research, as the technical advancements brought about developments such as the IoT pose complex political questions, including those raised by Howard (2015). In response, this paper sheds light on key political and social processes and highlights how standardized digital and automated technology applications are emerging in relation to the role of the public.

The new term is starting and we are launching a new seminar series - Rethinking politics in data times - on Monday, 2nd of October at 5pm. We are excited to have Dr. Lina Dencik (Cardiff University) to talk about her project DATAJUSTICE with us.